Lost and found and fabulous

Some of the most fascinating Hollywood footage has never seen the light of day - until now. Veronica Lee reports

Uncovered: Dean Martin and Cyd Charisse at work on Something's Got to Give, which was abondoned after Marilyn Monroe's death

By Veronica Lee

12:01AM GMT 23 Feb 2002

WHEN Oliver Reed died while filming Gladiator, it wasn't the insurmountable problem it might once have been. The film was mostly shot anyway and director Ridley Scott, using doubles, reshot scenes from different angles and completed the picture with computer animation.

But the death of a leading actor would once have shut down production for good, and Hollywood is littered with unfinished movies, because of stars dying, artistic differences or simply the money running out. This year's Bradford Film Festival will be mining this rich seam of Hollywood's history, showing previously unseen footage, documentaries and staging discussions on lost films.

One of those will be given by film historian and critic Eric Monder, who will show clips from, among many others, Alfred Hitchcock's Kaleidoscope (1967), Buster Keaton's 1962 comeback movie and Marilyn Monroe's last film.

Monder is full of anecdotes about Hollywood's golden age of the Thirties and Forties, when studios shut productions on a whim and told outright lies to keep the public from knowing about stars' addictions or antisocial behaviour. For instance, Merle Oberon was involved in a car accident while filming Josef von Sternberg's adaptation of I, Claudius in 1937. "Her injuries weren't that severe, even though she was hospitalised," says Monder. "Producer Alexander Korda used that as an excuse to close the film because he was having problems with Charles Lawton [a renowned drinker, who was playing Claudius] and von Sternberg. It was blessing in disguise."

Sternberg, an arrogant and volatile man, had previously got on the wrong side of Charlie Chaplin, too, who had commissioned him to direct A Woman of the Sea (or The Sea Gull) in 1926, as a dramatic vehicle for Chaplin's protégée Edna Purviance. Whether due to professional jealousy or the fact that Purviance was no longer the object of Chaplin's affections, we will never know, but, says Monder, "Chaplin didn't like it and burned the entire print".

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Sometimes films were left unfinished because studios lost their nerve. Hitchcock's Kaleidoscope, which was influenced by the European new wave, was just too controversial for its time. "Hitchcock had the class to get it started," says Monder, "but he wasn't really honest about its content to Universal. They thought it was too sexual and violent and pulled the plug."

It is thought that Orson Welles, too, suffered from the frights about projects being too ambitious - some say he left films unfinished by choice rather than circumstance. "He was a perfectionist, sure," says Gary Graver, cinematographer and co-founder of The Orson Welles Film Archives, who will also be taking part in the festival. "But he was no dilettante. He was so full of creative energy that at any one time he had several projects on the go."

Graver is currently bringing together the footage of Welles's The Other Side of the Wind, which he worked on with Welles between 1971 and 1975. It is a movie within a movie, about the end of the studio system and the coming of a new generation of directors. It's a satire soaked in sex and violence, starring John Huston, Peter Bogdanovich and Dennis Hopper, which director Oliver Stone, of all people, has described as "too experimental". Graver hopes it will be ready for release later this year.

The irony is that some of the unmade films could have been groundbreaking. Marilyn Monroe, who suffered several miscarriages, played a mother for the only time in her career in Something's Got to Give, and Monder describes the scenes with "her" children as "deeply poignant and bittersweet, a very different side to her acting", while von Sternberg's A Woman of the Sea, according to those few who saw it, was one of the most exquisitely beautiful pictures ever filmed in Hollywood.

The Bradford Film Festival runs March 8-23. Information: 01274 202030

On show at Bradford

Errol Flynn's William Tell (1954)

The film was Flynn's attempt to re-establish himself as a swashbuckling hero at the age of 44. He co-funded the project himself, with a bunch of Italian backers, but the film was abandoned two weeks into shooting when the money ran out - just 25 minutes of footage was in the can and was locked away in a vault, unseen by anyone but the crew at the time. The film has become part of Hollywood legend as the great "what if?".

Bruce Lee in Game of Death(1973)

Lee's Enter the Dragon had catapulted him to Hollywood fame after years of making Hong Kong kung-fu movies. Although the martial arts expert was supremely fit and only 33 of age, he died a few days into the shooting of Game of Death. Rumours abounded - including that he was in some way involved with Hong Kong's notorious underworld, or that he was killed at their behest - which helped make him into the cult figure he still is today. The film was abandoned only a third of the way through, and was finished with other actors five years later. In a curious coda, Lee's son, Brandon, also died (aged 28) during the shooting of a film, The Crow (1994), which was completed using doubles.

Marilyn Monroe in Something's Got to Give (1962)

Monroe, notoriously unreliable, was often late on set and had several disagreements with director George Cukor, which are clearly audible in the surviving rushes. Against the terms of her contract, she left the Hollywood set to appear at the charity ball in New York where she sang "Happy Birthday, Mr President" to JFK and the studio used the opportunity to sack her. Co-star Dean Martin insisted that she was taken back, but days before shooting restarted she was found dead in mysterious circumstances. The film - itself a remake of the 1940 Cary Grant/Irene Dunne vehicle, My Favourite Wife - was remade in 1963, with Doris Day and James Garner, as Move Over Darling.

Orson Welles

Although now recognised as one the 20th century's great film-makers, Welles's career was dogged by lack of interest and studio backing. It was a precedent set early in his career when, in 1942, RKO abandoned shooting on It's All True while Welles and his crew were still on location in Brazil. Welles left several projects unfinished at his death in 1985, including Don Quixote, The Merchant of Venice, The Deep and The Other Side of the Wind. VL